


Hope on the Walls - Two New Beginnings

by ashesandhoney



Category: Infernal Devices Series - Cassandra Clare, Mortal Instruments Series - Cassandra Clare
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-12
Updated: 2015-03-12
Packaged: 2018-03-17 12:16:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3529073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashesandhoney/pseuds/ashesandhoney
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Magnus Bane spent a piece of his childhood in the Silent City of the Nephilim. </p><p>Centuries later, eleven year old James Carstairs found himself in the same place while the Silent Brothers attempted to cure him of the yin fen poisoning. </p><p>This is a story of the connections that we don't always realize we are making. Two little boys, centuries apart, sharing the same room.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hope on the Walls - Two New Beginnings

 

When Magnus Bane was 10 years old he found himself with a plain stone room to call his own. It was safe. It was better than the streets. It was better than the man who wasn't his father. It was far from villagers and priests and promises of cleansing that left his lungs burning as he coughed water out of them, over and over again. It was miserable and cold and quiet but he was a child and he had no where else to go.

The Silent City lived up to its name. There was no wind. There was no conversation. There was only the dry whisper of the dead and that only if you were mad enough to listen for it. The Brothers provided him with what he needed but they left the warlock child to his own devices. Not cruel but not really people either. He never learned to identify the individuals among them.

The child didn't call himself Magnus yet but he didn’t call himself by the other name either. He raged sometimes. Screaming at the walls just to hear something. He thought about leaving and rejoining the world but he was still a child. The world was not kind to lost children. He was not stupid. He was old enough to know that. He learned to control the magic. Inch by inch he learned. His first attempts at magic were self-taught and never shared with the Nephilim.

He learned to change the walls. Plain white stone became blazing red or ocean blue or the colour of his mother's eyes. He brought in bits of broken stone and turned them in his hands, wondering if they were truly made of the bones of warriors. Sometimes he used magic, other times just a file and he shaped his bits of stone into a little army, into a little group of friends. He lined them up on the window sills and gave them names. He coloured them and gave them life stories. This one loved that one. These two were brothers. That one was rude. This one had a curse. That one had a secret.

When he left, he left the room as it was. He left the friends telling himself that he would make real ones in the world now that he was old enough to rejoin it. He left the walls the colour of the sky, all the colours of the sky that he hadn’t see in so long: a blend of pinks and oranges that made him think of sunrises, the deep blues of midnight, the bright blues of sunny afternoons, the gray of storm clouds. He left a new beginning in magical colour on every surface.

He walked away and hoped that the beginning he went to find would be that bright.

 

* * *

 

Centuries later another little boy found himself in a stone room. Everything hurt. His whole world was pain and the sound of a woman's voice that he couldn't quite force into words though he knew that she was speaking and it was important that he heard her. For a long time there was nothing but pain and cold hands and medicines that tasted like ash and burned like acids.

Time didn't matter.

Until they gave up.

They decided that he couldn't be saved. They brought him back from the world where everything was pain with the one thing that had helped. It wouldn't save him. It would only slow down his passing. He came back to himself in a stone room. There was no sound but if he worked hard, he could force his blurry eyes to focus on the bit of colour above him. Orange. He had been nothing but pain but now he was pain and but there was orange outside the pain which made it just a little more bearable. His body came back from pain slowly and the person he had been before came back too.

Ke Jian Ming. James Carstairs. That's what his mother's voice had been repeating. His name. He followed it back from the pain. It took a long time. There were so many things to remember that he didn't want to know but to turn away would be weakness. He would meet the memories. One by horrible one.

When he could lift his head he could see that the orange swirled into pink and then faded to a deep midnight blue down the walls the midnight lightened to the gray blue of day break and then the colour of the mid summer sky. It was all faded and chipped. A long ago mural left to fall into decay. Splashes of colour washed away by a drip of moisture near the window.

He gave each colour a memory. A good memory of his parents. One by beautiful one. The midnight blue of the sky before fireworks on New Years. The pink of the flowers his father sometimes dropped into his mother's lap when she was having a bad day. The yellow of mangoes cut up into pieces and eaten with fingers while his father told stories of London. Even the rust colour of the water where it had destroyed the colours became the colour of the leather on his father's violin case.

When the pain retreated enough for him to stand he explored the room. Even that was exhausting but it didn’t stop him. He found little figures made out of stone. Someone had made them but hadn't done a good job. They weren't recognizable beyond a round part that was meant to be a head and a rough cylinder of a body. One he found on the window sill but the others had been scattered on the floor, kicked under the bed, knocked askew and never picked up. It took a few days of fighting the weakness but he found them all and lined them up on the bedside table where they put his water and the horrible burning drug that eased the pain.

Eventually he was as well as he could be.

The drug brought him back a little at a time. He pushed himself day by day to do more than he had the day before. He walked the hall outside the room where the walls were stark white stone. As he got better he ran those halls then he ran the stairs too. He exhausted himself and the Brothers admonished him to rest but he was a warrior and his parents had died in battle. He would not waste away in a bed. The Brother in front of him nodded slowly. Accepting that this was a warrior's determination not a child's recklessness. Jem smiled for the first time in a long time.

One day he left that chipped and colourful room and went on to a new beginning. His new beginning, like the room behind him, was tattered and frayed and no longer too bright. He would live but it would be a short life. He wouldn't live to be 15. He had three years to do as much good as he could. As he followed the Brother out of the Silent City he carried his father's violin case in his hands, tucked inside was a rough hewn little figure still dyed a chipped but bright yellow.

 

* * *

 

Centuries later James Carstairs had found another new beginning and it was brighter than that one had been. In his home full of colour and sound he sorted through his violin case looking for a bit of rosin he had lost. He had been goaded into playing for a little group of old friends who had gathered over tea and cookies and the sound of rollicking children to talk about days gone by. A little girl with midnight blue skin watched what he was doing and picked up the little stone figure he'd put on the table while he searched.

Anna Lightwood picked it up and scampered across the room to climb up on her father's lap and show him the strange little thing. Magnus took it out of her fingers and turned it in his hands. The colour was worn and barely yellow any long. It took him a very long time of staring to realize why he knew it. This one was one of the brothers. That thought came back before he remember the room and the raucous colourful mess he'd left it in when he'd gone.

"Where did you find this?" he asked.

"I've had it since I was a child," Jem answered when Anna pointed at him, "When I was... sick... there was one room in the Silent City where I stayed to recover. It was a chipped mess but it was colourful. Someone had painted the walls and the ceiling. It was full of those little figurines. I kept one when I left. I wanted to remember that someone else had found colour in that place. A little piece of hope to carry around."

Magnus smiled. It had been rebellion to use magic to paint the sky so far underground. It had been a declaration of just that - a declaration of hope - that what he was wasn't as bad as his family thought it was. He hadn't intended it as more than that. He hadn't intended it for anyone else. He had expected the Brothers to paint over it and return it to white stone. They hadn't, they'd left a little bit of hope on the walls for another lost little boy.

"Did it work?" Magnus asked.

"I found more to hope for than I had thought possible when I left that room," Jem said.

Magnus smiled again and handed back the little yellow figure. Someone across the room called out a demand for music and Jem laughed when he went to answer it. Everyone's attention was on him when Magnus said to himself in a language he sometimes he forgot he knew, "I did too." 


End file.
